


Awake

by Emryslin



Series: The Canons [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 07:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emryslin/pseuds/Emryslin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur reflects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awake

A year is a long time. A century is a fairly longer time. Millennia are even longer. Even when you’re sort of dead.

There was no doubt in Arthur’s mind when he woke that he was dead. It was a strange feeling, being awake and being dead all at once. But not everyone got to experience it; this too, he knew. He was an exception.

He also wasn’t the sort of awake that he used to be when he was not dead. That sort of awake tended to mean restlessness and the need to be doing something at every moment. He wasn’t that sort of awake. He also wasn’t the sort of awake he experienced sometimes on slow, rainy days, when he felt warm and lethargic but also very, very _bored._ No, he was, on the whole, in a different sort of awake.

He was in the sort of awake that lent itself to thinking. The sort of diaphanous awake where time exists in a different realm all together and reflection is the only currency. So he did what any good person would do, and he reflected.

He reflected first on his childhood, because as most stories are wont to do, his started at the beginning. He knew now that he was born of magic, and he knew what had happened because of it. He knew this in the way a child knows not to leap from great heights, the way any person knows the sky is up and the earth is down and that every person is slightly different from every other person. In other words, he just knew, implicitly. And he did with this knowledge what everyone does with implicit knowledge: he moved past.

Instead, he thought of his mother, and her love for him. He could remember her face now, all golden and bright and regal and somehow strangely reminiscent of his own. She had loved him for all the time she knew him, and never stopped. She loved him, and she loved his father, and she loved Nimueh and magic and Tintagel and Camelot. She was filled with a boundless love that had brightened all the lives she touched.

The loss of the same love drove Arthur’s father to grief and anger. Where he mourned his wife, Uther felt immeasurable pain, and he drove that pain against an imagined threat. The same pain drove him to Morgana’s mother and to Morgana, when she was delivered to Camelot. Morgana had lost her parents, and Uther recognized his own pain in her, his secret daughter.

Arthur thought of being the Prince of Camelot, growing under his father’s strict but caring eye. He thought about his first lessons with a sword, about squiring for Uther, about being knighted. He thought about his tutors and his fellow knights. He thought about the loyalty of Leon, about practicing with Morgana when she was young and they could hide, about the bravery and heart of Lancelot and Elyan and the strength and confidence of Percival and Gwaine. He thought about his people and he thought about his friends.

This last made him think about Merlin, and he spent quite a long time thinking about this his dearest friend and companion. He realised that he had been happiest in all his days when he was just Arthur and Merlin was just Merlin. He thought about Merlin’s constant insistence that he do the right thing by all his people, and his gentle guidance in the strength of Camelot and the hope for Albion. He thought about Merlin’s refusal to drown him in honorifics and titles and courtly behaviours. He thought about Merlin’s insistence on smiling his widest when Arthur was at his lowest and needed hope. He thought about Merlin’s unflinching and infinite loyalty and bravery and faith. He thought about Merlin’s unflinching love.

He thought about their hunting trips and patrols together, that he always arranged to be just the two of them. That he would be without the protection of his knights had never worried him, because he took strength in Merlin’s presence and Merlin’s true-heartedness. Merlin was his luck and his conscience and his guardian angel, but above all, Merlin was his friend.

He thought about Dragoon and the Dolma, and how he always noted that their eyes were young and bright and beautiful and always reminded him of home. He thought about the power and brilliance of the sorcerer who defeated the Saxons at Camlann, and the man who bested Morgana in a forest halfway to Avalon. He thought about the way Merlin stopped smiling in the months before he died.

When he woke again, opening his eyes to air and earth for the first time in centuries, he woke with Merlin’s name in his heart and on his lips.

**Author's Note:**

> For merthurparty 2013 on tumblr, go team orange! Prompt: Arthur and Merlin
> 
> I'm so sorry, this was posted in a rush. I spent a few hours trying to write for the Space!AU for which I wrote the first three prompts but it didn't fit the prompt, so I had to scrap that. And then pack because I'm flying out in the morning and next I look up it's 11:30 and I've yet to have something for today. So this is what happened instead.
> 
> I do like the premise though, and I'd like to flesh it out with Morgana and Mordred and Guinevere (shit I forgot Guinevere) and others, but for now, it's about Ygraine and Uther and Merlin, mostly.


End file.
